


The house beyond the moon

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon, Pre-Threesome, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-14 12:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13008060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Dale Cooper would not live out the family life he had always dreamed of, nor could he be the federal agent he had always seen himself as. Beyond all expectations and delusions, beyond spirits and omens and burnt bridges and mourning, beyond the best years of his life, there is a house waiting for him, with an open door and a promise of peace.





	The house beyond the moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivendell01](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivendell01/gifts).



 

  1. **Corridor**



 

 _You don't know what you have until it's gone_ wasn't supposed to be a fresh new thought for Dale Cooper, an idea his brain concocted one late August morning while he was leaning on a corridor's wall in Harry's cabin. It was old news. It was the story of his life. The ebbing and flowing of the people and the homes he had lost had long settled in his blood, building up clots in his veins as the days went by and he was kept busy by more pressing pains. Only as he came back to this world, eventually, and Hawk found him one night under the moon on Blue Pine mountain, naked and crying, having left the curtains and Laura and the angels behind, maybe for the first time he felt like he wasn't losing anymore so much as finding. The past few dozens of hours of his life had been all about finding again, finding out, finding a space he could inhabit in a world that had grown old without him. Hawk had carried him away from the cold moonlit grove to a house Dale remembered in his dreams, and Harry Truman had been at the gate greeting him back, and Albert Rosenfield on the doorstep not far behind, and the pain of absence that had ruled his life was dulled, in a way, for a time.

 

Yet he did lose something, and that felt new.

 

When he found Albert waiting for him, standing stern and weary on that doorstep, the scene felt as natural as breathing: Albert had always been there for him. There was no return that did not encompass the rock-solid comfort of his presence. When Dale had spent the past days crying, curled up on the small bed in Harry's guestroom, piercing himself back together once more, and Albert had stayed there at the threshold of his awareness, along with Harry, letting him know that he was never alone, nothing had struck him as odd either. Whenever he found the courage to look at the handsome, worn-out lines of his old friend's face, he saw no dots of unearthly light, no flashes, no signals of hidden meanings. In walking out of the curtains one last time and renouncing the Lodge, Dale Cooper had resigned as an agent of the spirits that dwelt therein, had given up their direction, their protection and their help. He was drifting on his own, now.

 

Thus bringing him back to his moment of reckoning in the corridor on that late summer morning, with one hand pressed against his mouth like a surprised schoolboy and the total, unshakable certainty that the wooden anteater figurine on a nearby nook was laughing at him for being so damningly self-absorbed that he'd missed the obvious.

 

“ _Yes_ , you knucklehead,” came Albert's voice from the living room, with a fondly exasperated tone that brought Coop back thirty years in a single, aching heartbeat. He hadn't meant to snoop, he was on his way to fetch a honest-to-goodness sandwich for his honest-to-goodness second breakfast. He just found his feet slowing down to a halt to bask in that comforting ramble before he realized how private that chat was. “Your blood tests are off b-e-c-a-u-s-e the therapy is working, I'm telling it to you now same as the doctor will tell you next week, down to the spelling bee. I'll brave through your records with my own two hands if seeing that July's tests were the same will help you catch some sleep tonight.”

“Took you... what, twenty minutes to find that scintigraphy last week?”

“And it'll take me fucking five now that I've cast my red thread in that bona fide labyrinth of paperwork, and as crazy as it may sound, picture this: it'd take the two of us combined zero minutes if you believed me to begin with.”

Harry's voice wavered and Coop's heart sank, cursing the unjust universe that had ever allowed that man a single moment of sadness. “I'm scared, Albert. I would've been alright kickin’ the bucket three years ago. Not last year at its worst, I couldn't give up when you were there with me, and not now. Not now…”

“Hey, cowboy. Look at me. I know. I know. There's nothing to fear now. Let me talk you through this any time you need it. Focus on my voice.”

“Or your lips?”

“Hell, that works too. Come here.”

 

Dale caught his breath as a bitter, envious sort of happiness washed over him. Of course Albert wasn't there for him, Albert couldn't have known beforehand that Dale was coming back even if he'd wanted to, and after their meeting at the Sheriff's station, Dale would have understood if he didn't. He'd kept picturing his returns and Albert was there every time, spurring him to find his way back, but all that load of wishful thinking ever accomplished was to take the man for granted again, just like he'd done on that day and so many times before. Albert was there in the end, but not for him. Harry was there in the end, but he wasn't waiting for him with open arms either. They'd found each other first, while he was gone. Patched up each other's wounds as best as they could.

A number of memories slid into place, slower now without the supernatural nudges that he'd always thought were his own skills, but at a steady pace. The TV was aimed at the couch and not at Harry's beloved armchair; the newer mugs were sets of two; most importantly, more so than the fact that the cabin only had one guest room and Dale was presently occupying it himself, the collected works of Miles Davis were proudly displayed above Harry's ancient record player. Albert lived there, he'd lived there for a while, even though not long enough to move his full collection.

 

Bitterness and envy faded by lunch, when he came clean about his eavesdropping and the words to congratulate them came easily, softly on his tongue. The underlying happiness remained. Albert and Harry. No wonder the cabin felt filled with love - and he could be witness to it, and bask in it. The world had kept spinning while he was gone, again and again. Sometimes for the best.

  
  


  1. **Attic**



 

A thumping of wood had seeped into the peaceful harmonies of the house. It took Dale a while to attune his ears to the irregular, muffled noise that had joined the whirling of the washing machine, the imposing ticking of the grandfather clock, the clucking of chickens outside and the evergreen concert of creaking, rasping, squeaking planks that arose every time the wind so much as puffed a breeze in the walls’ direction, and which the first cold gusts of fall had turned into a soothing symphony. Dale remembered it all from long before, a few days of comfort in an equally windy March, just him and Harry shutting the world outside, the house used to be old then and it was older now, and they were old now, too. But the thumping was new. It beckoned, and Dale followed.

 

His investigation led him up a rickety spiralling staircase, past a hatch and into a sun-drenched heaven. Rays of light filtered through a roof window, filling the cramped attic with yellows and golds. Dale's entrance lifted a cloud of dust and wood shavings, beyond which, at the center of piles of old junk, he could admire Harry Truman, sitting on an upside-down bucket, using a barrel as a workbench, and turning around a considerable and vaguely rodent-shaped chunk of wood on that makeshift table with a pleasant _thump_.

 

Taken aback by that vision of a sun-kissed angel among clutter and debris, Dale smiled in delight as he shook off the wood shavings that had landed on his sweater.

“Whittling?”

“You bet, Coop!” Harry beamed back. “Wanna try? I can teach you…”

The offer was tender, timid, and full of hope. Harry had this frailty about him, always did, and now more than ever, as if the deep lines marking his skin had let the frost in and some part of the man had died on a long winter long ago, leaving the rest of him to compensate as best as he could.

As he knelt down beside him, Dale learned how brittle the present could be, how thin its roots, in a way that not even his travels with Laura, filled with longing and regrets, had ever driven home. Dale Cooper knew how to whittle. He had learned to whittle as a Boy Scout and he remembered, as clear as that crisp moonlit night, how he had showed his little wooden whistle to Harry in his patrol car, when they were out by the Roadhouse on a stake. But then, after that, Dale got a blink of an eye and twenty-five years of shadows. Harry lived through them all, past all those winters, leaving something behind with each passing season. Out of the rare and finite moments they had shared, this one got lost in the shuffle, along with others they may or may not ever find out about. Dale wasn't sure of which option was sadder.

Yet Harry's kindness did not waver. And neither would Dale's. He would go through it all over again, as if this were a new life and all that had come before were gone, and he would treasure Harry's teachings, his passion, his love.

“Harry, I'd be glad.”

 

He let Harry's tired, coarse voice guide him through the basics, most of which his brain remembered, but his muscles struggled to keep up with. Setting aside Harry's would-be life-sized capybara for the moment, they picked a two-by-four and tried push cuts and stop cuts, discussed the virtues of basswood as they decried oak and ashwood, both of which “are just going to mess you up and piss you off, as that good guide once said”, and Dale got to raise an eyebrow as his newfound mentor listed cloth band-aids, tourniquets and hemostats as key tools of the trade. It made him shoot worried looks at Harry's hands and wonder where a few faded scars had come from. He asked. Harry answered - mostly stray cats, it turned out, as he could hardly go on his way without trying to pet each and every one of them. Dale didn't know that, back then, and now a love for cats (and capybaras, and anteaters, and the rest of the wooden fauna that populated the house) was part of his image of him, along with his newfound love for knit hats to complement the Stetson, a change in taste which, Harry explained, predated his current need to keep his freshly regrown hair as warm as possible.

When he felt Harry's fingers linger on the back of his hand, nominally to help him get a feel of the grain of the wood, tears finally welled up in his eyes. He made a promise to himself never to forget this moment, holding onto every detail - the barrel, the warm sunlight on their backs painting Harry's flannel a bright shade of forest green, the amorphous promise of a capybara staring with empty wooden eyes at their entwined hands, joined together again after too many years to be fair under any calculation - like shapes in a kaleidoscope, thrown together to form a one-time picture that looked like magic.

As an attempt not to ruin the moment, brushing those tears off with a hand covered in sandpaper dust backfired with a pained yelp. Dale had to rush down to the nearest sink and wash it all off, and, when Harry reached him, his eyes were red and puffy like after a long cry.

“You look like you need a hug,” Harry pointed out.

“I have full trust in your judgement, and, in earnest, I wish it had occurred to you earlier...”

Their embrace was still full of dust and sunlight. And the kaleidoscope turned, the new picture just as beautiful as the one that had come before.

  
  


  1. **Kitchen**



 

At one point in his life, the part that was long gone and buried, Dale Cooper would have thought it in poor taste to stride down the house with one of those newfangled sleeved blankets draped on his back, like the pretend king of a fairytale kingdom. But the season was growing cold and he had nobody left to impress, no reputation to uphold, and the concept of sleeves on a plaid was worth exploring in full, so he made his way to the kitchen, blanket billowing in tow, in search of a soothing mug of coffee. Or would he really have thought it in poor taste? Reaching back through his mind, all he could find were prim and proper black suits as per Blue Rose standards, clean pressed shirts whether cotton, silk or flannel, sober classic ties, not a hair left ungroomed. If there had been exceptions in his youth, he'd left them behind. Fading memories was all they were, in the end.

 

Beyond the kitchen door, Albert was leaning on the worktop, kneading large amounts of dough. He turned to look at him, hands lost under a fearsome sticky mass of flour, milk, eggs and other ingredients Dale couldn't make out, their envelopes lined up further behind him. He raised an eyebrow. And went back to kneading.

“Work on that crown, Coop,” he added after a handful of awkward seconds, to make it clear that his disapproval was aimed at Dale's regalia and not at the man himself. Which was appreciated: where Harry was pushing himself each day to move past his wounds and find new common ground, and make Dale feel home, Albert, for the most part, remained more reticent and prickly. Dale wouldn't judge - maybe his oldest remaining friend, too, was pushing himself to his limits, held back by deeper wounds. Harry had, after all, never met Diane, never mourned her loss twice over.

“I'll work on balancing a snazzy mug on my head,” he said. When his simple attempt at humor was met with amused grunt, he figured that sitting there for a while wouldn't be pushing his luck. Their respective guilty consciences might clash and bleed, but for Dale, simply existing in the same room as Albert Rosenfield remained a blessed privilege. Albert loved deep and true, and wouldn't let himself stray. Dale found comfort in it, he felt safe fetching his coffee and curling around it at that kitchen's table as Albert went about his mundane business.

 

He stared at the elegant curve of his head, wondering if affection as intense as what he was feeling in that moment could be felt through thin air and on the skin. Fearing a positive answer, he retreated to the warmth of his coffee. At which point Albert's phone, which had been resting on the table, lit up and gave off one sharp vibration.

Dale crossed his hands on his heart.

“Albert…”

“I heard. Did you see who it’s from?”

“Don't you want to see for yourself?”

“Android 'Donut’ was a solid decade ago, Coop, I doubt my phone would appreciate being doused in yeast as a throwback.”

Dale batted his eyelashes politely, letting the technological reference go over his head. More pressing concerns had arisen:

“...Albert. It says 'Hi dad’.”

“Yes, that's what I figured. Runner-up was 'hi asshole’, statistically speaking.”

“Albert, you have a _child_?”

Albert turned around with consummate theatrical timing and stared deep into his soul. It felt like a crowbar through his heart, and the crowbar was made of sarcasm,but it still left him reeling. Just like the old times. “Yes, Coop, she emerged from my head fully formed at age twenty-eight. Do me a favor-”

Dale fumbled through a reply as he pictured a full array of possibilities. In the end, all he managed to say was: “...She?”

“She. Special Agent Tamara Preston. The one and only. Now please, unlock the goddamn phone, hit up reply and type 'what’, lowercase, no punctuation, or she'll think I've grown old and complacent.”

“Correct me if I have this wrong... there's an automated capital letter and I'm switching it off, although I fail to see why. I will make sure to forfeit the question mark as well.”

“I'm old school, that's why.”

“How so?”

“Look, we'll reschedule _internet irony through the ages 101_ to a latter date, just please do this while I try to bake this surprise for Harry, will you? And tell me what she says. The alternative is I type, you knead, but I seem to remember getting your hands sticky bothered you.”

Dale cocked his head to the side as if to get a different picture of Albert, one that showed the care and kindness that went into remembering a minor hangup from a lifetime ago.

“Done. Is she really your daughter?”

“Pupil. She wouldn't dream of calling me dad in person either, at least not while entirely sober. But she's a different beast in writing, and me quitting and the subsequent severing of our professional relationship helped her give considerably fewer fucks about it all. One day, maybe.”

 

There was magic in this world, and it included Albert Rosenfield accepting, even hoping to be seen as a father figure by a young agent. He had apprentices back then already, workaholic prodigy that he was, he taught them and he spurred them, but Dale remembered that back then, they used to call him 'natural selection’ behind his back: working for him meant that only the strongest would survive. Dale stifled a sad smile as he tried to picture the Albert he knew over the man in front of him. The sharp angles didn't match. The phone rang again.

“Albert, she has answered already. Not a whiff of concern for the preservation of your capacity for internet irony, I would add. She says there was a private office party yesterday, you know the ones, she says? Do you?”

“That'd be the M.O. of our esteemed Chief of Staff. You'd like her.”

“And everyone brought a present for you too! She's sending a picture… that's a nice amount of presents, Albert. And another picture, zoomed out… they put them all under a stuffed hedgehog? Wearing Ray-Bans? Is that meant to represent you, Albert?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, let me see.” Holding onto his dough, Albert turned around to peek at his phone and let out a groan. Truth be told, Dale did not think that it sounded altogether displeased. “Yes, the plush is new. Courtesy of the Bureau's finest, no doubt. I weep for our nation.”

“Well, they couldn’t have needed it while you were there yourself. Another text! She says the presents are from the bosses plus Kennedy, Skadden, Rummel, Malone and herself. She took them all home and will mail them here tomorrow. Additionally, Buckhorn has been duly notified and will send something soon. She also advises to be nice and send something back.”

“Tell her to book extra luggage space for her legs and haul her entire ass here soon, someone will have to answer for that bespectacled fabric abomination.”

“Lastly, she says that they miss you.”

 

That last admission shut up Albert and Dale as well. While he wasn't looking, one by one, a whole new family had flocked to Albert. They stood by him. They shared his love. The radiance he had always seen in him touched so many, in the end.

It wasn't his place to say anything to claim his place among these others, so he only whispered a few words into his coffee, leaving it to chance whether the world would be aware of his confession: “I missed you too.”

  
  


  1. **Sunroom**



 

Back home.

His new life was inscribed in the perimeter of the house. Inside it, in a slow process of decompression, Dale was once again learning to exist to the rhythm of a shared reality, breathing in and breathing out the same air as his companions. One day in November he ventured into the woods again, falling into the mists and the resin scents that surrounded the house, and each step felt like an extension of that hyperuranian peace. But it couldn't last, not yet. The world soon led him back behind those four walls.

 

Frank Truman parked in the driveway and hurried them out of the car right as the few drops that had cut their walk short turned into a deluge. Dale waited for Harry to get his hat before grabbing his hand and scuttling toward the safety of the front door.

“You gentlemen done becoming one with nature?” called Albert from inside, as he kept the door open and held three big, warm towels in his arm for the unlucky hikers. Dale came in last, struggling to keep up with Harry's longer stride, and Albert unceremoniously dropped the last towel on his head.

 

“Who you callin’ gentlemen, Rosenfield? I thought you'd eaten enough thesaurus with your cereals to know what words go when.”

“Your brother, mostly,” replied Albert without missing a beat. “For the rest of you, it's charitable hyperbole.”

“You heard the man, Cooper. I'm charitable, you're hyperbole.”

 

A few minutes and a change of dry clothes later, the trio reconvened by the spacious couches of the sunroom, the old porch of Dale's memories, now enclosed for the sake of aching old bones. Three steaming mugs were waiting for them on the coffee table; an amused and vigilant Albert was sipping from a fourth one as the rain kept raging outside. Dale helped himself to a blanket and dropped on the couch with a satisfied shiver. His legs were going to kill him in the morning, but the views had been worth it. And just as worth it, right in that moment, was the pitch-perfect combination of simple physical tiredness, hot coffee, dim yellow light coming from two round table lamps in the far corners of the room, and the raindrops drumming against the sunroom’s glass walls before trickling down into so many streams.

 

“...and we would've made it if not for that meddling city slicker,” Frank concluded, capping off the riveting tale of how they would have made it back to the car a few minutes before the rain started falling if not for for a break - masqueraded as snack break - which Dale had requested. Frank's words were mocking, but his tone, like the looks he was shooting at Dale, was simply curious. Dale could only suppose that understanding him better might have been Frank's point all along when he set up the field trip.

“Me?” said Albert, pointing at his chest with his free hand. “I was home all day. You two are not dragging me into activities that any fellow homo sapiens sapiens would describe as _positively prehistoric_ ever again. You've even got yourselves another designated victim now. Shoo.”

“Sure thing. That's why I meant him.”

Interestingly, Dale didn't remember Frank being that belligerent during their walk, where he had proven himself a capable and experienced guide, and the kind of companion who knew how to appreciate a long, good silence. Sure, the man had his firm principles and firmer idiosyncrasies, often about the darndest things, but whenever he visited, it looked like half the energy he could muster was aimed at poking Albert. For the time being, Dale filed him under the intriguing label of 'overprotective big brother at age seventy’, until more evidence came up to allow him a more comprehensive outlook on Truman family matters.

“What, Coop?” Albert countered. “Decked in flannel and stuffed in trekking boots bigger than he is? That's no city slicker, that's a born boor.”

“Why, thank you, Albert.”

 

He, too, would have liked to learn to know Frank better. Seen through heavy eyelids, he looked like a shadow, the dark side of Harry's moon. People think they understand the moon just fine even without peeking at the other side, and for most people's needs, they're not wrong, but they are nonetheless missing out. They were two of a kind, the Trumans. Dale watched them cross their leg in synch and reach for the same slice of pie as Frank shared precious tales from Harry's youth, when he was as fast on his feet as a fallow deer and would trot back and forth around the rest of the hiking group to climb on every goddamn rock to take pictures of the rest of them. The taller the rock, the better. “Frank... Frank was more of a moose,” Harry recalled, but refused to elaborate after Frank crossed his arms and shot him a stern look. As they finished each other's anecdotes, their stories criss-crossed the landscape of their youth, painting it in vivid colors, and blurring its edges, or Dale just lost track of the details of which brother did what as he listened with his eyes closed and his breaths deeper and deeper and deeper until he eventually fell asleep.

 

His dreams went back to his first day in Twin Peaks, when he met the Sheriff in an endless hospital corridor. “Sheriff,” he asked Truman as the wind howled around them, “what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here? Big, majestic…”

“Douglas firs,” answered Frank, standing by Harry's side, and the woods were calling them all, encompassing in their grace all the shapes and possibilities of their little lives.

 

Dale woke up on the couch. The sun had gone down, draping the room in a comforting darkness. No trace of Frank; in front of him, with his feet set firmly on the table, Albert was reading the newspaper.

On Dale's shoulder, Harry was snoring softly. He curled an arm around his shoulder and kept him close, promising that if he was lost in his same dream, there was a light at the end, far away. That in that light, he loved him still. That they would make it through.

  
  


  1. **Front yard**



 

All around him, the world teemed with meanings. Buzzing, clashing, vibrant symbols filled the sky just beyond the range of his perception, codes made of collimating lines on the horizon, answers given in birdsong, leaving the air as still and dense as the eye of a storm.

Red curtains had been drawn shut and life remained opaque and out of focus, but as he breathed in, for a few moments, Dale could once again feel close to this world's symbolic weave, discerning warp and weft under his fingers. The moment was portentous; he wondered what was about to happen.

 

Albert walked past him.

 

He grabbed his coat and scarf from the hanger, put on the coat, unfolded the scarf, re-folded it in three equal lengths to measure where to wrap it around his neck to let both ends fall symmetrically - Albert could be fastidious like that, alright - and walked out, past the snow-covered front yard, finally stopping by the gate.

Painted by the last pale hues of a wintry sunset, his lone figure rising out of the snow was strikingly handsome. Familiar and unknown at once, bristle and warm, carrying many contradictions inside him, he cut a line through Dale's weave and left him with his heart aching, drowning in the sight of him like he'd never allowed himself to do in their youth.

Then, instead of walking out, he leaned on the gate and turned back toward Dale, gesturing for him to join him. His hand moved slowly, weighed down by doubt, or all their movements were drowsy and dilated, the whole world spellbound under the fresh snow.

 

Dale Cooper nodded, just as slowly, feeling tasked to recognize the width of the gap between them and close it. He took three steps toward the front door, fetched his coat, tripped on the hanger, let his coat fall on the doormat as he caught his balance and got some mud on it, which he rushed to brush off with egregious results. Throughout that ordeal, Albert stood by the gate and watched, and if he raised an eyebrow in detached amusement, it was still a far cry from the colorful string of mockeries Dale might have expected. The fire had gone from him. The man Dale remembered was long gone. But Albert Rosenfield lived and breathed in that moment, and Dale could still reach out to him. Not give him for granted. Not leave him behind. So he crossed the white lawn and, with it, the stillness and aloofness that had made his oldest friend so hard to grasp. He had been asked to come closer. He followed.

 

As he came to a halt next to Albert, Dale felt the warmth of a hand on his shoulder, a firm grasp that kept him close and real. He had done the same on the day they met again, months before: Harry had welcomed him back to the world with a warm embrace, Albert had kept his distance and gripped his shoulder tight so that he wouldn't slip away. Dale needed that just as well.

 

Eventually, Albert nodded to himself, putting a close to a long and exhausting fight with his own inner demons.

“We're gonna be late,” he said.

“Thank you for telling me, Albert,” Cooper said. “I will see if I can make dinner, or I will get it delivered.”

“Coop, please. Harry or no Harry, who by the way spent the day with Hawk and is in all likelihood already sipping a beer waiting for us, take that mental image of me willingly spending more than three hours at Esoteric Crime-Fighting Book Club, ask yourself why you ever elected to entertain it, and slam dunk it in the trash. I don't mean me and him, I mean me and you, right now, late to the meeting, if this conversation keeps stalling.”

“This conversation?”

“Yes, this here conversation.”

As he snapped back to say that, Albert grabbed a piece of fabric out of his pocket and pushed it on Dale's chest, holding it there against his beating heart. Dale cupped Albert's hand for a second, squeezed it, silently thanking him for whatever this was about and whatever strengths it had asked him to gather, snatched the fabric from under it and got a good look at it: it was a round embroidered patch, lined in red, with a golden sword doubling as the trunk of a tree. The symbol of the Bookhouse Boys. With a coy smile that belied a good deal more pride than intended, Albert unbuttoned his coat to show the same symbol peeking out of the breast pocket of his shirt.

“When?” Dale asked, filled with wonder and excitement.

“Last year. Around this time. In my defense, they serve good beer. Hawk, who f-y-i is the one who got me into this pyramid scheme to begin with, told me to give it to you when the time felt right. It should've fallen upon our cowpoke charmer, needless to say, but he said that inviting someone twice is bad luck, so lo and behold, here I am.”

 

Dale thought of his old patch, finding the memory so fresh that it could bleed. It was the day he almost kissed Harry then and there when he received it, then thought better of it and instead kissed him over dinner, in the privacy of this very cabin. He left the present atop his suitcase at the Great Northern, room 315, lording over his already packed shirts and suits. Then he had to unpack, which if nothing else gave him more days to spend with Harry and marvel at each other's every breath. But the patch stayed there. In his suitcase. There they must have found it, bagged it away as evidence, and there was a chance that the forensic hand that committed such blasphemy was none other than Albert's himself, trying to find any trace that would lead him to his Coop, failing and failing for a quarter of a century. That patch had to be resting in the back of a storage room in Philly, faded, never worn. This one would not follow the same fate.

 

And this bond wouldn't, either. Lo and behold, there he was. Sharing that patch, that moment, that part of his life with him. Dale smiled and smiled until his cheeks hurt, and when Albert offered him an embrace, he was still smiling with his face pressed against his shoulder.

 

“Say, Albert, riddle me this,” Dale mused, minutes later, as they got off the car. “Aren't we tired of occult societies, you and I?”

“Yes, Coop, I see your point and raise you: good beer. Furthermore, this loutish troop’s got one big advantage over Philadelphia's finest: they've kept an eye on these woods for longer than you and I have been alive, and the only member they ever lost? He saw himself out, on grounds of being an asshole.”

“That's the leading cause of defection? Being an asshole?”

Albert nodded.

“We're good, then, you and I?”

He stared into the distance. “We’re on thin fucking ice, pal.”

They walked together, hand in hand, toward the sunset.

  
  


  1. **Further still (to the stars)**



 

So a lethargic winter came and went, as they fell into a comfortable routine. Fearful. Grateful. They tiptoed around each other so as not to disturb their healing rest.

Spring broke.

 

Dale stared out of the hotel window into the night below. Seattle, unsurprisingly, was and was not the city he remembered, and he counted the landmarks he could still name as a full moon reigned over the crowded skyline. Many things could happen under such a moon. He counted the towers and theaters again and was relieved to find that, even after the blink of an eye, the moonlight hadn't spirited them away.

As he took in the dark roofs and neon lights of the city, he remained acutely aware of the space occupied by his body in this unknown room and of the other two bodies present behind him, familiar volumes in an alien space. Harry was resting, curled around his partner. Albert was sitting on his bed, leafing through the booklet of the disc he'd gotten signed - the reason they were in Seattle to begin with. An aging Puerto Rican jazz legend was on tour, it could be the last chance to hear him live, it mattered to Albert, and what were they, after all, if not lumps of last chances trying to get by.

 

The two of them resting on that bed possessed a beauty that Dale lacked the words to describe in a way fitting for a work of art that moves to tears. He could see them so clearly in this foreign territory. This moment was on the verge of something. Home was far away, all its habits left behind, the Lodges were farther still, and what lay ahead was...

 

The moon cast a long, burning shadow. There was too much space between them. Dale could disappear.

 

Those healing months, and all the travels that came before, had doused a fire in him. Living in stillness hadn't burnt him or them, but their days together were numbered. If he pushed forward and got it wrong, was there a way to backpedal? Not in his life. Maybe not in theirs either. Dale Cooper could not afford any more mistakes. But he knew then that he could not keep braking, either.

 

“Gentlemen,” he whispered, dreading their full attention as he stumbled stumbling through the beginning of his declaration, yet loving Albert's piercing gaze on him and Harry's deep trust in anything he might be about to say. He couldn't let them down. “I find myself wishing, in certain facts of life and in almost all of those which mean the most, that words weren't necessary. I wish that an image, or a gesture, were allowed to express a situation, or an emotion, in all its complexities instead.”

“Time for the annual address to Congress, Coop?”

He sighed. “Well, Albert, you could call it a formal statement, if it so suits you.”

“Then let us hear it.”

“In the past few years, I have long interrogated myself about love, about the ties that were and weren't severed in this world or others.” He could see Albert perk up; Harry remained quietly trusting but reached for Albert's hand.

“And knowing that I... made my life’s gravest mistakes in giving this love, this beautiful force, and in requesting it, and in forgoing the words that cannot, in this most meaningful fact of life, be forgone, I…”

“Coop?”

“I don't want to make the same mistakes. Not now, not with you. I can take time to offer my love to you and accept to take it back, in part or in full, if that will be your answer, but it would be both untrue and unfair to keep it hidden and…” he closed his eyes and nodded to himself, knowing what he was about to say to be as real as any truth he'd ever uttered, “...and I am sorry this is so late. I am sorry I threw it all away over and over. There is no more joyous sight than the two of you sharing this life together, and I adored you, Albert, since before I knew what to do with a sentiment this simple, and you Harry when I was learning, but hadn't learned to make it last, and…and by virtue of all the powers and the struggles that allowed us to be here in this very room on this day, I…”

 

He didn't get to finish the sentence. Albert squeezed Harry's hand, looking at his partner for reassurance, and both nodded at the clear memory of long, pained talks between them, lost loves, dead hopes, pacts and promises for impossible days that would never come. Albert was quicker on his feet; he strode past the bed and planted two hands on the side of Cooper's face, keeping him close and still as he found his lips and kissed him. “About time,” he muttered, and Dale let him lead, losing himself in the tenderness of Albert's touch. He cared. He always cared. So much time wasted but they were there now, kissing old regrets away from each other's mouth. Then the kiss was broken and Dale found himself pushed away and turned around, because Harry had joined them as well and everything was wonderful anew. Dale's lips lingered on Harry's, Harry who kept smiling through their kisses, who told him in his ear that he'd never given up, to which Dale could only stifle a sob. But Albert was holding him tight from the back, hands now on his hipbones as he fondly kissed the base of his neck, and Harry protected him and pressed his body against his, and safe in between them, Dale Cooper was happy.

  
  


“Maybe some times you don't know what you have until you find it again.” That felt like a fresh new thought for a fresh new feeling, so, middle of the night be damned, he cheerfully shared it with Harry and Albert from the vantage point of the middle of their king bed, voice muffled from under the layers of blankets. Harry wrapped his arms more tightly around Dale's frame and Albert's head rubbed lightly against his chest. Far away, the moon was setting.


End file.
